AUSTRALIA – Scientists have made a shocking discovery hundreds of kilometers below the Great Barrier Reef!

AUSTRALIA – Scientists have made a shocking discovery hundreds of kilometers below the Great Barrier Reef!

Bizarre prehistoric sea life has been discovered below the Great Barrier Reef. Perhaps as an accident, as the mission was to document species under threat from ocean warming.

Ancient sharks, giant oil fish, swarms of crustaceans and a primitive shell-dwelling squid species called the Nautilus were among the astonishing life captured by remote controlled cameras at Osprey Reef.

The AFP reports that lead researcher Justin Marshall Thursday said his team had also found several unidentified fish species, inkling “prehistoric six-gilled sharks” using special low light sensitive cameras which were custom designed to travel the ocean floor, 1,400 metros below sea level.

“Some of the creatures that we’ve seen we were sort of expecting, some of them we weren’t expecting, and some of them we haven’t identified yet,” said Marshall, from the University of Queensland.

“There was a shark that I really wasn’t expecting, which was a false cat shark, which has a really odd dorsal fin.”

Marshall said the research had been made more urgent by recent oil spills affecting the world heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef, and the growing threat to its biodiversity by the warming and acidification of the world’s oceans.